My latest user story is about being a consultant

February 22, 2017

Or something similar. I digged into a codebase I had little knowledge about, interviewed people and wrote a document about it. Sounds fun? It is!

The scrum team I am part of consists of people from several teams, including developers from a handful of different components. Even though I’m coming from one of these teams, as I had not worked on our component before, and there were totally new components to be implemented in the scope of our project, I have mostly worked on these new components.

It’s been a great experience, I got exposed to Java - okay, I am quite vague, but I haven’t used it before in a company context. More specifically I had some great times learning Java 8’s streams and also gained some experience with JAX-RS.

Then for one small user story I worked on a C++ component being developed by my component team. Besides completing the user story, I had the chance of more than doubling the number unit tests in the component. Well, it’s hard to call it a real chance, as other devs have been working on it for more than a year.

I don’t want to complain about the code or praise it, it wouldn’t be fair. I want to mention one thing:

Analyzing the code I didn’t really know before, interviewing the developers, checking the code again, then making suggestions was great. It is really interesting. Is that what real consultants do? I’m not sure, but that’s something I’d like to try if then I can implement my suggestions.